209: No Such Thing As A Sexy Black Hole

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Glasgow

My name is Dan Shriver and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunt and Murray, Anna Chaczynski, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is when a very large star quietly turns into a black hole without the usual explosion, the official term used by astronomers is a massive fail.

Poor star.

As if it wasn't embarrassed enough.

It wasn't able to make the explosion.

Well, it turns out that about 30% of massive stars turn into massive fails.

And they found this out quite recently.

They were looking at an area of the universe called the Firework Galaxy.

where there's loads of supernovas.

So when it explodes, when you've got a big star and it explodes, it's called a supernova.

And eventually that turns into a black hole.

But sometimes it's happening without the supernova.

And this area called the firework galaxy had loads of supernovas, but there weren't quite as many as they thought there should be.

And they couldn't work out why.

And then they were looking at a star called N6946-BH1.

Ooh.

My uncle's called that.

So

that's an Aussie name.

It's a prisoner number, isn't it?

When he's out in five years, you'll regret saying that.

And they noticed that it wasn't there anymore and it had just kind kind of quietly dissipated.

And this is a thing that happens that they've only just found out in the last six months or so.

But I think massive fail is a really unfair way to characterize it.

Because, so basically, yes, the way stars turn into black holes is it was thought that they turn into a supernova, as you said, and so there's this huge explosion.

And then they suddenly shrink into a black hole.

But then these stars aren't doing the explosion.

But that actually means that they don't blow away as much of the debris.

So apparently, supernova blow off a lot of the star's outer layers.

And so, therefore, there's not as much gravitational pull left to make a massive black hole.

So, actually, the massive fails make a massive hole, a bigger hole than the massive successes or whatever they call the supernova

ones.

I didn't know that black holes are not really holes.

Yeah, did what did you think they were?

I thought they were holes.

Oh, yeah, of course.

I could probably have inferred that from your previous sentence, I think I made clear.

But

they're the opposite of holes.

Do you guys know this?

Black holes are the opposite of holes.

What's the opposite of a hole?

Like a sticky out thing.

Just a big bulge.

Well, yeah.

They're really, really full.

They're fuller than anything you've ever seen in your life because they're so dense.

So, for example,

so how much do they weigh?

Okay, they could have a mass greater than 20 times the mass of our sun, and the really big ones can have a mass equal to four million suns.

Those are the extremely large supermassive black holes.

But they are everything crunched inwards.

So it's just like a very large body which has been crunched down to a tiny sun.

They could be any size really.

Basically it's it's the density that's the important thing.

So you can have tiny ones, you can have massive ones, you could be a black hole.

If I squash you down to the size of about a tenth the size of a neutrino, you would be a black hole.

Okay, but you and me would fall out.

If the Earth got about as dense as a black hole, if you were crunching it down to roughly the density of a black hole, it would be about the size of an eyeball.

It would be about two centimetres across.

Everything

at that density, down to the black hole.

And the whole point of it is

the gravity is so strong, light can't get out of there.

You can't get to the escape velocity because light can only go at a certain speed, and so nothing can escape because light is the fastest thing that there is.

If light can't get out, then nothing can.

Although, that's the thing about black holes that's been challenged over the last few years, isn't it?

And by Stephen Hawking.

Who, yeah.

So it was assumed that black holes did have this strong gravitational pull that would mean that everything just disappeared into them.

But it turns out they do what is referred to as a cosmic burp.

And this apparently is when they consume so much, they overeat, they eat so much stuff that they almost are force-fed huge amounts of gas and they can't swallow it all so it spits some back out.

That's amazing.

It's really hard researching black holes because I guess we don't really know fully what they are.

It's all hypothetical.

And as a result, they do stuff.

All the headlines I was looking into is colorful language like they burp stuff up or I read one that I got excited by which was a black hole caught having a post-lunch nap after it eats solar system and I was like this is gonna be great and then it it was not it was

What did you think it was going to be?

When you said you thought it was gonna be great.

Did you think they were gonna describe the fold-out bed that they had all set up in their office?

I don't know.

I clicked on it just optimistically not thinking anything.

Yeah.

So the stage before a black hole is a thing called a neutron star.

So this is where a star collapses, and it doesn't collapse with quite enough force to become a black hole, but it does become a thing called a neutron star, which is very, very, very dense, but not as dense as a black hole.

So this is very cool.

A sugar cube of neutron star would weigh on Earth a billion tons.

Yeah.

It's hard to imagine what a billion tons is, isn't it, really?

Yeah, it's like

imagine a billion one-ton elephants?

Can I put it that way?

Whoa.

Yeah, exactly right.

And suppose to say, it's pretty difficult to pick up your cup of tea, I think.

That's going to break the china.

Well, if you so, this is the cool thing: if you drop a marshmallow onto a neutron star, if you're ever in a position to do so,

it's got such a strong gravitational pull that the impact will be the same as an atomic bomb because of the amount of gravity pulling the marshmallow towards it.

Do you guys know when the first supernova was recorded on Earth?

No.

The year 3600 BC.

Hmm, yeah.

So this is a paper that's been put forward.

It was found in Kashmir on a cave wall.

It was a cave painting which had two bright glowing objects in the sky.

And so this paper is putting forward the idea that it was the first recording of it because the people in context of the painting weren't hunter-gatherers.

They were in a very separate situation.

So they looked at it very cleverly by going, how can we prove that our theory is right?

It's a supernova.

And there's something amazing about supernovas that have been logged.

It can happen back in 3,600 and it was glowing in the sky, but the remnants of it still exist.

You can still look for bits of it in the sky.

So they've actually been able to look at one specific supernova and date it to roughly that period.

So it's called HB9.

That's the supernova that they believe it is.

And they think 3,600 years ago in Kashmir, first ever supernova recorded.

And they named it after a pencil.

Yeah.

That's actually my auntie's name in Australia.

There was a supernova in 1054, which was visible all over Europe.

Europe was the best place to see it.

It was visible in the daytime for three weeks, and at night time it was so bright that it cast shadows on people on Earth.

Okay, it was absolutely massive.

But no one in Europe wrote about it.

Why not?

So it was written about in China.

It was written about, you can see it in cave paintings and stuff like that in other parts of the world.

But basically, there was a schism going on between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church at the time.

And apparently, both sides thought that it would be an ill omen.

And so no one wrote about it at all.

And they just kind of ignored it.

And it's like, what's that?

And they're like, well, nothing.

That's amazing.

You do get rogue black holes, these rebellious black holes that do wander around the universe.

So a lot of black holes are at the center of galaxies, and the vast majority that we've detected are at the center of galaxies.

But you get some that don't have their own galaxy and they've only been detected recently but it's kind of thought that they've basically had their galaxy stolen off them.

So this is weirdly, this is what astronomers call mergers is when it's like a financial terminology, but a minor merger is when a larger black hole eats up all the stuff that's circling around a smaller black hole and then those poor black holes that have had their equipment stolen, they just spiral off into space and they're just bouncing around space.

Or it's thought maybe they bump into another black hole, to put it extremely crudely, in a way that an astronomer would faint at.

And

yeah, they crash into another black hole and they are propelled away into space.

So they're alone black holes desperately looking for a mate.

I think like cowboy maverick black holes who don't give a damn what anyone thinks of them.

And they're on a mission of vengeance to get their stuff back.

Yeah, they're sexy black holes.

Hey, what I really like about this fact is the massive hole, sorry, the massive fail bit.

So what I love is the massive fail thing because astronomers have a really good sense of humor.

There's a lot of jokes and a lot of just little acronym puns that happen.

I found a couple.

There's one that's called the collaboration between Australian and Nippon for Gamma Ray Observatory in the Outback, or Kangaroo.

There's the package for the interactive analysis of line emission, or point of ale.

One word.

Okay.

Point of ale.

Okay.

I thought that was proud.

How about this one?

There's a star that's been named after Vladimir Putin.

Unfortunately, it's been named by Ukrainian astronomers who've named it Putin Hulio or Hulo, which roughly translates as Putin is a dickhead.

And that's a star in the sky.

It only costs $10 to do it, but it's quite nice that it's Ukrainian astronomers who officially did it.

They do.

They're famously in the astronomy circles, good with acronyms.

It's kind of like doctors.

So you go to like big uh astronomy conferences and there's just all these presentations that are based on acronyms.

So yeah, I think there's Poopsy, which is Phase One Observing Proposal System.

There's Super Huge Interferometric Telescope,

which is

Shit.

It's shit, Glasgow.

I mean, I can't believe you're not more comfortable saying that.

Normally when audiences are all shouting shit, they're turning it at me.

There's just one that is absolutely pushing it too far.

So this is what it's called.

And this was a name for a workshop, a big astronomy conference.

And it was titled Testing Astro Particle with the New GEV Observations, Positrons and Electrons.

Identifying the Sources.

It's too long.

I forgot what the first letter was.

I know.

It's Tango in Paris.

Imagine if someone got that.

You would have only had to have listened.

Oh, yeah.

Imagine the brain that could possibly

have reached that conclusion.

So speaking of Imagine the Brain, we should probably talk in black holes,

the death this week of Jim Bowen.

No, Stephen Hawking, of course.

Very much into black holes.

Hawking radiation is what he's famous for, which is the fact that black holes get smaller over time by very, very small amounts, and he discovered that.

He had quite a good sense of humor, didn't he?

Yeah, I think.

Amazing guy, yeah.

His Tango in Paris joke didn't go down so well, but all this other stuff.

I love, there's a official biography of him that came out in 2012 was by a lady called Kitty Ferguson, very good biography, and she wrote in it that there was a rumor that Hawking used to run over the toes of people who annoyed him.

And he would do it sort of subtly as if he was just turning around or something like that and while she was writing the book because she had access to him and asked him the questions she said is this true this rumor that you do this and he said it is a malicious rumor i'll run over anyone who repeats it

he was a wild wheelchair driver though um like years ago when you know he was able to do whatever he wanted with his wheelchair and a colleague said that he used to show off a lot with his tricks so he used to do a lot of spins he used to drive his wheelchair incredibly fast he actually once broke his hip crashing into a wall in a show-off stunt that got out of hand.

Yeah.

There was one.

So the Times ran a section of Stephen Hawking's stories, basically, and things he'd done.

There was a time where he was appearing on Newsnight and he was in the pre-phase.

They were getting the studio ready for him and they were setting up all the lights.

And one of the producers pulled out a lead for one of the lights and Hawking immediately slumped over in his turn.

Producer absolutely freaked out.

Thinking you killed Stephen Hawk.

Ran off to get someone, came back a few minutes later, found him giggling and fine.

What a guy!

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Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Tsazinski.

My fact this week is that Levi jeans are set on fire before they're sold.

And this

specifically by jeans, ones with holes in them, or like distressed bits on them, you know, like sort of rips or bits that look cool.

And

they've been on fire in the factory.

That's how they do this.

So there's been a lot of coverage, well, a bit of coverage lately about how Levi is changing the way it distresses its jeans because it's got new laser technology, which allows it to make its jeans look really worn just with lasers rather than by hand.

And yeah, if you fire a laser at jeans, obviously it can set them on fire.

And that's how you get the effect of the holes in jeans.

And if you go into a Levi factory, or many jeans factories also use kind of laser technology, then it just smells of smoke all the time because you're sort of setting jeans on fire all the time.

But this is really good because the previous way they did it was really bad, basically, right?

Yeah, people having to do it.

Yeah, you basically had people getting a pair of jeans, putting them on mannequins, and just scrubbing them with sandpaper and with chemicals, and they get very sick.

I thought you were going to say put them on and set themselves on fire.

In 2014, there was a Japanese brand which, to get their jeans distressed, they were called zoo jeans, and they had jeans which lions, tigers, and bears had attacked in a zoo.

They only made three pairs, but

I don't really think you want to wear those, do you?

Because once a bear has gotten the taste for those jeans.

That's true.

It'll go on a mission of gene vengeance for you.

Well, it was so clever how they did it.

So they took old tires and giant rubber rings and things that animals in zoos are given to play with.

They wrapped them in a sheet of denim, gave them to the animals.

Animals went rip, rip, rip.

And then they took, as they said, the most fashionable remnants.

And they turned those into a pairs of jeans.

Very cool.

Wow.

Well, they also have got people to wear down jeans for potential consumers.

So this is a Welsh denim label called Hyut, and they, in 2014, they hired 50 men to break in their jeans.

So they made they hired all these men and they had to wear these jeans for six months non-stop.

So wear them every single day, whatever they did, and they weren't allowed to wash them.

And so there was, I read an interview with one of the guys who said he wore them every day for everything.

He played rugby in them.

He cooked in them, so you know, cooking spills.

He did carpentry in them.

He was a carpenter.

He sunbathed.

He cycled every day.

He sunbathed in them.

He did not get a good tan.

But then then that's to kind of make them seem worn and then they were auctioned off and you know they got a few hundred pounds each for them.

A few hundred pounds for six months work though.

I know it's not a good rate is it?

Let's hope the carpentry business worked out.

Apparently if you wear jeans and you commit a crime They're kind of like a fingerprint.

The police can tell the jeans that you're wearing.

If they catch you on CCTV and the CCTV is good enough They have a unique wear pattern So if you're caught on film, they can look at them and they can tell that these are the actual jeans that were used in the robbery.

As in

the specific pair, or they can tell that that was all the, oh, he's wearing skinny jeans there, isn't it?

No, no, they can tell the actual pair.

So, like, let's say you have been playing rugby and sunbathing in a pair of jeans, or you've just been walking down the street, they look slightly different, and there are forensic people who can tell the difference between what you've been doing and can tell your jeans from someone else's jeans.

Wow.

What you should do is just have a pair of crime jeans.

Ah, yeah.

When the forensics guys look and they say, well these jeans have only been used for crime.

And then you keep them in a drawer

when you're not out criming.

They can be used as armor jeans in a way

because there was a guy in Pennsylvania a couple of years ago whose strange wife attacked him with a box cutter to his genitals.

But his jeans were so thick that they stopped him from getting injured.

Wow.

A little tip for you?

A little tip?

That's all he lost in the fight.

Wow.

Did it rebound off the cloth or did it?

Was there a rip in the fire?

So there was a rip in the jeans, but she couldn't get through the jean fabric because it was really thick in the crotch area.

Wow.

Handy.

Very.

They're sometimes the process of making jeans is quite intense.

So they're sometimes baked,

which, you know, to get that worn look.

They're repeatedly washed they are they're um so they used to be sandblasted but the new way of doing it with lasers is it takes 90 seconds I think to make a pair of jeans look like it's been worn for a year whereas it used to take about half an hour um but do you know why so this is all kind of technology that Levi is at the forefront of but do you know what made them famous why we think they

what made Levi's famous sort of

early jeans yeah I thought they were like the first Levi Strauss made the first jeans

Well, so he didn't invent jeans.

What he invented was, you know, the weird bits of metal.

The rivets.

The rivets that are in your genes, and that no one knows why the hell they're there.

That's what Levi invented.

So

they're there to protect the genitals from your estranged wife.

Bizarrely, they didn't because they had to get rid of them specifically on the crotch because if people were outdoors back in the day leaning over a fire, they would suddenly heap their genitals up.

That was the biggest complaint.

It was like, I was having a nice time by the fire when my balls lit on fire.

But yeah, those metal bits actually keep them together, and I've always wondered what they're for.

And they were invented in 1871 by a guy who came to Levi-Strauss, who marketed them, and they keep genes together.

So, jeans used to just fall apart before that because they didn't have that strengthening technology.

And that's what they did.

And they also put the tiny pointless pocket in, which, you know, that pocket that's inside the pocket.

We know what that's for.

Yeah, it's for pocket watches, which haven't existed for about a century, and yet still they are in jeans.

Okay, yeah.

That's good.

And weirdly, I think the patent for it, everyone assumes it's the denim, but it's actually the rivets.

Yeah.

When they actually filed the patent, that was the big thing that they were trademarking.

That's cool.

Yeah.

This sort of stuff on lasers.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Do you know that parrots have been flying through lasers recently?

Because this is so scientists want to make better drones.

They want to make us work out technology for how to fly better.

And so they've been investigating how birds fly.

And there was a study done, I think last year, but there was a study done that looked at the flight of a parrot, but they needed to investigate exactly how they flap their wings when they take off.

And so what they did was that it was actually a parrot let, which I really like.

It's like a really tiny parrot.

But what they did is they had it fly through a bunch of aerosol particles in the air that were then lit up with lasers because they're so precise.

So then you can have the aerosol particles all illuminated and then the lasers kind of show what kind of wing movements they're making.

And so they found out how birds' wings moves when they fly and then we can use that in drone technology.

But what's quite sweet is that obviously going through lasers is quite damaging for you.

So if you look it up, they designed tiny pairs of goggles for the parrots to protect them from the lasers.

Parrotlets as well.

Huh?

For parrotlets.

So they're tiny little glasses.

Really tiny, yeah.

It's almost as sweet as not making a parrot fly through a load of lasers.

I imagine piratelets would what children pirates would have on their shoulder.

Pieces of four.

Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact this week.

Thomas Edison tested over 1,600 different materials to find the right filament for the inside of his light bulbs including fishing lines, cardboard and hairs from the red beard of an old friend.

Imagine if that had been the most successful as well

all light bulbs would have to be full of red beard hair by now it did turn on it would be excellent for the economy of Scotland

a risky comment

yeah so this is this is one of those stories that is Thomas Edison as a character so clouded in apocryphal stories and legends and so on.

But this was reported in a number of official biographies about him.

But the story goes that they were trying to work out how to make the light bulbs of the original light bulb he was doing last longer than a few hours or so on.

They had a limit on it.

And he tried over supposedly 1,600 things.

And when it was 1,600 things, it would be like they used like 40 different varieties of bamboo.

So that would be part of the list, for example.

So it wasn't completely random things like ripping beards off and so on.

But

one of the stories from an official biography says that a friend of his of old days, who who was his boss at a station, at a railroad station that he worked at when he was younger, called Mr.

McKenzie, came in.

He was a really fun character.

And Edison, as a joke, said, Why don't we try it with your red beard?

Took off the strands, put it in.

It did go up, and it had a red light as it went up as well, which was nice.

Yeah.

And yeah, so.

Actually, when they did that, there was a competition between McKenzie and another guy called John Creusi.

And they wanted to have a competition whose beard would be best inside the

bus.

Yeah.

And Creusi, he was Swiss and he had a big black bushy beard.

Mackenzie was more bristly and straight and they had a competition.

And McKenzie was the winner, but actually, they were both pretty shit.

What was the thing that won, excuse my ignorance, out of these 1600 things?

Was it the well now?

We use what, tungsten or something, don't we?

Oh, yeah.

But it was bamboo at the time, wasn't it?

Or sort of a bamboo filament.

Bamboo is what he is.

So it was bamboo to start off with.

He found Japanese bamboo and he sent a team of of explorers to South America and they found some really good bamboo.

But then they got confused and they forgot where they found it.

So they brought some back, but they couldn't remember where they got it from.

So then he had to send another guy called James Ricalton out to the jungles around the world, actually.

Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, India, all over.

For a year, he looked around for the best, perfect bamboo.

And he got to Sri Lanka and he found this bamboo.

It was amazing and it was going to be perfect for the light bulb.

And he got home to Edison and he said, I've got this bamboo.

And Edison said oh we're using carbon now

and then carbon was the final thing that he used that's that's really harsh yeah it's quite funny though

Edison could at least have said oh thank you this looks great thank you great and then quietly said we're going to use the carbon you know to

like let him have a few days of thinking he'd won the amazing thing about the carbon actually that was invented by a guy called Lewis Howard Latimer

and he was an African-American draftsman who was the son of an escaped slave slave.

But the amazing thing about him is he invented the carbon filament, which made Edison's millions.

But he was also the draftsman who drew up the patent for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.

Wow.

So he's part of those two massive things.

The big rivalry.

Yeah.

But his light bulb was obviously very revolutionary, even though he didn't technically invent the light bulb.

But I guess he was extremely good at PR, Edison.

So he had this invention factory, which made sure they turned up the best inventions.

And one good PR move he made was in 1884 on Halloween.

He got so employees of the Edison Electric Lighting Company, they paraded up and down New York with light bulbs strapped to their heads.

So they all.

Maybe that's where that came from.

But yeah, this was amazing.

It was to show off the new light bulbs, which had just been invented.

And there was a huge horse-drawn generator in the middle of all these hundreds of employees of the factory.

Horse-drawn generator, which changed steam into electricity, so this big kind of steam-powered machine in the middle, and then hundreds of people who were held together with wire that was going from the light bulbs on their heads and down through their sleeves and then linking them to the next person.

So, kind of like you know, there's gloves that you wore as a child that connected to each other through your chest.

Oh, mittens, yeah, what?

Yeah, mittens, not through your, I mean, around your chest,

But yeah, they paraded through New York and it was this huge Piano thing.

All these people tied together with light bulbs flashing on their heads.

Sorry, were they tied together because it was one chain?

Yes, it was one circuit.

Imagine if one of them had gone like in Christmas lights and you had to go through testing every individual employee.

No.

He used to do, so for ideas, he used to do this thing.

And this, again, has been written in a bunch of biographies.

And a lot of people think, did this really happen?

We're not sure.

He used to, when he was falling asleep, he thought that's when he had his best ideas.

And he would think, I would have the idea, and then I'd fall asleep, and I'd wake up later and go, oh, what was that amazing idea?

So he used to take naps during the day on a chair, and in his hand, he would hold metallic balls, just two metal balls, with a metal plate underneath him.

So as he was going into that zone where he was having an idea, as he was going into a nap, his hand would go loose when he fell into the sleep.

The ball would land in the plate, wake him up, and he could immediately go, oh, that idea is amazing, and write it down.

And no one's officially said that that's definitely the case of how he did that.

But there's a famous statue in Florida of him, which people always go and visit.

And in his hand is a metal ball, which gives a little nod to the fact that they think it was true.

That's cool.

Yeah, he did.

He was famous for taking naps because he said that sleep was rubbish and no one needed that much.

And he said he only had three hours of sleep a night.

But there are all these photos of him with Henry Ford, who is one of his best friends, of Ford fame.

There are all these photos of him asleep.

Henry Ford's really often awake, and he's just having a nap in the background, just like constant cat naps.

And they were close, him and Henry Ford.

They were super close, yeah.

It's like proper BFFs for life.

They went on camping trips together.

Big one,

so Edison became confined to a wheelchair in his later life, and Ford bought a wheelchair for himself so they could have wheelchair races.

Yeah, no way.

Yeah, that's really sweet.

And there's a thing which is quite famous, but maybe a lot of people haven't heard, which was when he died,

they captured, they were said to do this, and it was handed over to Henry Ford by Edison's son, the last breath of Thomas Edison.

So they had these little test tubes, and there was eight of them that were sitting along there.

breathed his last breath.

They put in the cork afterwards.

And if you go to this day to the Henry Ford Museum, he has the test tube on display.

Yeah,

you don't know which is going to be the last breath.

They must have been stuck there for a long time.

Yeah.

For months, maybe.

You just wait there.

Did they wait with a test tube and say, here's the last, the second last breath of the

third last breath.

Fine, okay, new test tube.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's apocryphal.

It's in a museum, yeah.

This won't go in, but I'll just quickly say it because I read it today.

I read the last words of Roald Dahl.

And Roald Dowell's last words, he was surrounded by his family.

He was very ill.

And his final words were,

the thing I'm going to miss most is being with all of you.

That was his final words, and then he went down, except it wasn't quite his last words because the nurse who was with him thought, I'll make it easy on him and gave him a shot of morphine to make it go easy on the way out.

But as she did it, he went, oh, fuck!

And those were Rob Dell's last words.

Brilliant.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that it's only worth leaning over to pick up a 1P coin if you can do it in less than three seconds.

Anything more than that?

Waste of time.

Move on.

I reckon I could do it in that time.

I'm sure you could.

Yeah, I'm sure you could.

But you'd have to do it pretty much every three seconds for it to be worth me giving up my job.

You would.

Yes.

Yeah.

This basically applies if you're on the median UK salary, which is £539 a week.

And if you do that, assuming you work a 40-hour week,

nine to six with an hour for lunch, let's say

you've got 2.6 seconds to do it.

Now, the problem is, if you earn more than that, obviously you have to do it a lot faster to make it an economical exercise for you.

So the Prime Minister, based on her current salary, I have assumed a 60-hour week for her because she is busy.

But I have given her an hour for lunch, don't worry.

She would have to do it in 0.5 seconds, which is quite hard.

That's tough.

I've worked it out for Cristiano Ronaldo as well.

On his current salary, he would have to do it in 0.002 seconds, and he would have to pick up 391 every second to make it worth his while.

Wow, he is quick, though.

He is quick.

Yeah.

I worked it out for Philip Hammond based on his

independence article that estimated his income.

So, this is not just his salary, it's all of the money that comes in for him.

And he would have to be able to pick it up in 0.2 seconds, which is coincidentally the limit of human reaction time.

So he would have to immediately notice it, pick it up without any movement, just notice it, pick it up, notice it, pick it up, notice it, pick it up.

Basically, that's the fastest anyone can possibly pick up coins, I reckon.

Wow.

But if he did that, he really would not be getting on with the job, would he?

And it is an important job he's got.

I would say he should focus on being Chancellor and then leave the coin picking to.

To Theresa May.

Maybe that's what she's been doing.

It's a strong plan for Brexit, Britain.

We're just going to look for any coins we can find.

We've got no trade deals, but has anyone looked behind the sofa?

But this is kind of

partly about how the 1P is silly, but it's not worth very much at all.

And there's a lot of talk of getting rid of it, right?

So I think it's basically not worth picking it up at any point.

You're not even allowed to pay with 1Ps in more than 21P z.

So I

so if something's 22p you can't pay with just one piece.

Yeah and I've broken the law on multiple occasions.

Well it's it's not a law per se it's that they don't have to accept it as legal tender.

Yes.

But if you're in one of those self-service places and you can just put them in really quickly before they notice then you can do as many as you want actually.

Yeah.

So yeah there is an idea of getting rid of the one P's and the two P's and I think George Osborne wanted to do it didn't he when he was chancellor but David Cameron said we shouldn't because everyone will vote us out.

And

the amount of money you pay to make them is more than what they're worth.

It's something like six out of ten UK 1P and 2Ps are only used once and then put in a jar.

And then one in 12 the coins are thrown into the bin immediately.

And at one stage, the Royal Mint was having to make 500 million 1P and 2P coins every year to replace those that were going out of circulation.

I do not believe anyone throws 1P coins into the bin.

Does anyone here throw coins just into the bin?

One in 12 people do, so.

No, they in a charity box or into a jar.

Straight in the bin.

Not a maniac, but I've been tempted.

It's completely insane, baby.

Okay, so did you say 500 million a year?

Yeah.

Guess how many pennies the UK made in the year 1933?

God.

It's the worst game show ever.

A billion.

Seven.

So

They made seven pennies for the whole year.

What?

Why did they do that?

Because they had loads already, it turns out.

But seven is a strange number, isn't it?

You would think zero.

Why would you need seven more?

Get the machines back up and running.

Does anyone have seven P?

Okay, the reason for it was because I think the Mint didn't want to miss a year.

They didn't want to have a year in which they did not make one of the coins of the realm.

So they made seven.

Oh, wait a minute, they must be really rare.

They're so rare.

So this is, they're even rarer because three of them were placed by the king under the foundation stones of important buildings.

Okay, two went to the British Museum, two went into private hands.

Which buildings do we know what they are?

I don't know.

I think it probably is known.

There are four prototypes coins as well.

And one of those in 2016 sold for £72,000.

Wow.

Yeah, they're so rare that people started modifying 1935 coins because they can most easily be adapted and made to look like a 33 penny

If you do find one of those do hang on to it

They used to in the eighth century

They had pennies, but they didn't have because things would cost less than a penny So what they ended up doing was just they would chop the pennies in half So if you were in a shop, you'd be like I need some change and they would just slice your penny in two and give you the either the quarter or the half that they would we had halfenies as well, didn't we?

Half pennies.

Yeah.

Well, sorry, hatepennies were, they came about from the chopping in half and actually the design of coins in that period, like the 8th century around, and then in the 1200s, Henry II introduced what was called the long cross coin.

And it was a coin where the cross figure on it, the Christian cross, went properly from top to bottom and from right to left.

And that was to make it easier to cut.

So that was if you could give change, you could give it more easily because you could just break it up.

And then that's where hatepies comes from.

Actually, that's where pieces of eight comes from as well, isn't it?

Really?

Because you were saying before about pieces of four and whatever, the pieces of eight was you would have a coin and you would cut it into eight pieces.

And that's why a quarter is called two bits in America.

What were they made of to that you could chop it so easily?

Metal,

soft metals, specifically silver.

Silver and gold are quite soft, aren't they?

Exactly.

And that's why

if you get a gold medal and you bite it, yeah, to prove whether it's real gold or not, to prove it's gold, it's not harder, it's softer.

So if you bite something that's made out of gold, you should get little teeth marks in it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Unless it leaves really big teeth marks, in which case it's a chocolate coin.

Yes.

Don't be fooled again, Dan.

Just on that, like, so people used to chop little bits off the edges of coins, and that was a really bad crime.

And it had very severe punishments, because obviously it's devaluing the coin of the realm.

But people used to do it anyway, because you can melt down the silver and recast it.

And in 2015, again, a hoard of silver clippings was found in a field in Gloucestershire by someone with a metal detector.

And it was a huge bundle of shaved-off coins.

And I just love the name it's been given.

It was called the toenail hoard.

Because it looks all these little round trimmings of coins, they look like a toenail hole.

That looks amazing.

That's why coins have got milling on the side of it.

So, little kind of indentations on the side of every coin, if you look at it, that's to stop people from shaving off.

And that was invented by, I think, Isaac Newton, who was the master of the mint, as well as doing all the other stuff he did.

It's such a good name, isn't it?

Here's another idea: get rid of one P's, two P's, five P's, ten P's, and fifty P's, and instead have one P's, three P's, eleven P's, and thirty-seven P's.

You've gone mad.

Yeah, it's just maths, Andy.

It's just maths.

If you have those coins, then it makes it easier for any kind of combination of coins to be used for any number of any price, basically.

37P.

Yeah, because they're all prime numbers, so apart from one, but they're all kind of

prime numbers.

One's kind of a prime number, isn't it?

Oh, we're going to get so many letters.

But basically, it means that, say, something's you know, 76p or 84p, it's just easier to work out with that specific number of things.

On average, it's 4.1 coins per transaction compared to 1p, 2p, and 5p.

Two of them will be 37p coins.

That's so hard to work out.

No, you get used to it pretty quick.

Like, if you had to learn your 37 times table just to pay for stuff,

you know, the first person who introduced the penny to the UK

was this is also in in the 8th century, and this is King Offer of Mercia.

So, 8th century, he made the first penny in the UK.

And the incredible thing about this, which I just love, and I learned when I went to the British Museum and I saw an example of one of his early gold coins,

is this.

So, only three gold coins from his reign survive, so the introduce of the penny to Britain.

And

he, on the he was a Christian king, and the phrase around this gold coin in the British Museum is, There is no God but Allah alone.

And it is because

it's so incredible.

So it was just a century after Muhammad, basically, and the Abbasid caliphs were taking over large parts of Europe.

And he wanted to be able to, well, we're not entirely sure why the coin said this, but one theory is that he wanted to be able to trade with them.

And they would see these coins as valuable.

They would recognize that and think, yeah, you're one of us, that's fine.

But then a lot of other people think actually he just didn't speak Arabic and he had no idea what those words meant.

And he's a Christian king who accidentally wrote on his coins, There's no god but Allah alone.

Kind of Japanese characters, and it actually says, You English winker, kind of thing.

Do you know what the least valuable coin in the

world is?

It's an Uzbek coin, and it's the one Tigin coin, okay?

If you had 3,000 of them, you would have one penny.

That's the exchange rate, 3,000 penny.

And I worked out that Ronaldo,

if he wanted to make a profit, would have to pick up 1,173,000 Tian

every second.

He is fast, though.

Okay, let's wrap up, guys.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Shaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com, where we have all of our links to our upcoming tour dates.

We have links to our book.

We also have a link.

Actually, we don't, do we?

It's a very exclusive thing that we've got this tour cassette, and we're about to give one away, actually, to a member of the audience who sent in a fact to us at the beginning of the show.

So for a cassette, Andy, what's the winning fact?

The winning fact comes from someone called Julien Mazé.

I hope I'm pronouncing pronouncing her name right, and it's this.

It's about the city we're in.

It's that.

Glasgow was once voted the friendliest and most dangerous city in the UK

in the same year.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much, guys.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.

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